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Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says the company is “severely understaffed” amid the ongoing WordPress drama with WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. The WordPress co-founder took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday.
The story began when Mullenweg described WP Engine as a “cancer for WordPress.” Mullenweg has called out WP Engine, claiming that they are not contributing enough to the open source project and that WP Engine’s use of the “WP” branding has confused customers into thinking it is part of WordPress.
The dispute led to opposition from engineers, and even Automattic employees. On October 3, 159 Automattic employees who disagreed with Mullenweg’s direction for the company and WordPress in general received a severance package and left the company.
After 159 Automattic employees took the first deal, which included six months of severance, Mullenweg posted another match offer on Automattic Slack on October 17. This second deal offered nine months of severance, but employees only had four hours to respond.
“With the first deal, we cut off your same-day access,” Mullenweg said. “The second deal we said, oh 159 left. We’ve seen a huge increase in business, so we’re hiring as quickly as we can. So, for the second deal, if you’re the one who leaked, we’ll cut off access to you immediately. But for the others, we may ask Some of them are staying on until next year, just because we’re so understaffed, so we need to hire, so there were some other people who took it.
Mullenweg’s comments suggest that Automattic was looking to catch the employee who was sharing company information with members of the press in connection with the ongoing drama.
Mullenweg confirmed that before this saga began, Automattic had approximately 19,000 employees, and that the number of employees now stands at approximately 17,000.
The WordPress co-founder confirmed that Automattic hired 26 people in October amid the drama.
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